FreeBSD 8.0 benchmarked against Linux, OpenSolaris

Phoronix has done another benchmark test of FreeBSD against other *nix systems: Fedora and OpenSolaris.

“With the stable release of FreeBSD 8.0 arriving last week we finally were able to put it up on the test bench and give it a thorough look over with the Phoronix Test Suite. We compared the FreeBSD 8.0 performance between it and the earlier FreeBSD 7.2 release along with Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Linux side and then the OpenSolaris 2010.02 b127 snapshot on the Sun OS side.

FreeBSD 8.0 introduced support for a TTY layer rewrite, network stack virtualization, improved support for the Sun ZFS file-system, the ULE kernel scheduler by default, a new USB stack, binary compatibility against Fedora 10, and improvements to its 64-bit kernel will allow a NVIDIA 64-bit FreeBSD driver by year’s end, among a plethora of other changes. With today’s benchmarking — compared to our initial Ubuntu 9.10 vs. FreeBSD 8.0 benchmarks from September — we are using the official build of FreeBSD 8.0 without any debugging options and we are also delivering a greater number of test results in this article, along with a greater number of operating systems being compared.

The hardware we are using for benchmarking this time was a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 2GB of system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 7200RPM SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics processor powering a 1680 x 1050 LVDS panel.”

And last not least this in terms of power consumption. There is one major problem with this benchmark: they compare FreeBSD with highly optimized operating systems like Fedora, Ubuntu and even OpenSolaris. But FreeBSD is by default maybe tuned for some small headless mailserver.

UFS suddenly looks very slow…. maybe it’s time we change to ZFS. I had never thought FreeBSD would get beaten this bad. We can’t really loose on every single test (yea, yea, except one)… There must be possible to do some optimization and still be just as good on the server side.

Maybe the tests doesn’t mean much, but they do give a bad impression of FreeBSD, and that’s bad news :(